Ian Power: Brace [Semayd]. My first encounter with Power’s music found “slow, widely-separated and often repeated sounds” but with “messy edges” – a tendency that appeared both soncially and conceptually. While maintaining an impassive exterior, his music relies upon internalised self-discipline from the musicians to determine the course of the composition. The elemental string quartet Brace Each Other Dive comes across to the listener as a constructivist assembly of contrasting sonorities, but the finer matters of timbre, intonation and texture in each block of sound are given life and interest by an unpredictable degree of imprecision that lurks behind each switch in direction. The intrigue comes from Power’s compositional method for this piece: a set of instructions to the players with loosely-defined materials, often relying upon the musicians’ own judgement and intuition, such as “Eyes closed: 1 person plays a 30″ solo using one of the above materials, e.g. very slow bow, mp-mf, 3″, non vibrato.” Some passages require eyes to be closed, others open, adding to the taut balance between freedom and control. The piece is realised by the Bergamot Quartet, who pull off the whole thing with inventiveness and clarity, sounding confident and spontaneous. To give you an idea of their commitment to the piece, the booklet comes with excerpts from the score, together with the quartet’s own “graphic shorthand” score for realising the piece. The graphics show the extent of their imagination, with an approach far beyond what I would envisaged as a technical sugbject. The quartet is framed by two shorter works; reveni ad me has Power himself playing organ in piece which moves in slow-motion between small, clustered chords and clean intervals. The untitled piece for viola and cello uses a minimum of textural contrast as material, moving together almost in unison with a plastic treatment of notes and effects being expanded and contracted. The musicians are Andrew McIntosh and Jennifer Bewerse, who make the most of the implicit variety in colouration.
Quatuor Mémoire: Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn [Mnémosyne]. Three Québécois string quartets performed by an ensemble dedicated to new music. All three are big on making use of sonority as a material, with what sounds like forms of distorted spectralism. As a matter of fact, one of the blurbs online states outright that they share interests in “exploration of microtonality, complex polyrhythms, and sound-based compositional approaches”. The first two are compact: Florence M. Tremblay’s Insides is peppered with moments of busyness, with some neat interlocking patterns, before morphing into slews of long sliding tones. Other than that, the polyphony in these pieces is more about texture than rhythm. Louis-Michel Tougas’s Quatuor à cordes no. 2 “Vague à l’âme” throws in dramatic gestures here and there at odds with its tendency to languidly pass time in luxurious but slightly sour-toned colours. The third piece is extensive: Olivier St-Pierre’s Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn stretches out beyond half an hour. It draws its inspiration from classical Greek conceptions of time, but the question is how its use of time manifests itself to the listener. There are recurrences and refrains, but the overall impression it made with me was of a traversal of a horizontal landscape with large open spaces, with occasional moments of interest spurring sudden activity. These brief outbursts do signal variegations in the material, creating a fairly broad, earth-toned palette and torquing the pace of the work just enough to add tension. Some nicer details for appreciation come through here and there on closer listening, but for your first hearing you will either want to soak in the faintly carbolic waters or else wonder when something is going to make you sit up and take notice.
Leave a Reply